Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India
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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CONTEMPORARY INDIA Edited by Knut A. Jacobsen First published in 2016 ISBN: 978-0-415-73865-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-31375-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-68257-0 (ebk) 11 YOGA AND PHYSICAL CULTURE Transnational history and blurred discursive contexts Mark Singleton (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 647963 (Hatha Yoga Project)). 11 YOGA AND PHYSICAL CULTURE Transnational history and blurred discursive contexts Mark Singleton Introduction We might consider yoga in contemporary India under three rubrics: 1) non-English speaking renouncer traditions, such as the Nāths, Rāmānandīs or Daśanāmi Saṃnyāsins, in which yoga sādhana plays a greater or lesser role and in which foreigners are rare; 2) modern, urban Indian schools of yoga open to householders and the general public in which Hindi or another Indian vernacular may be spoken, sometimes alongside English (e.g. Kaivalyadhama in Lonavla, or Swami Satyananda Saraswati’s Bihar Yoga Bharati in Munghir, Bihar); and 3) schools and individual teachers catering almost exclusively for foreign students, who may adapt their teachings to the expectations of these students by teaching yoga forms popular in the West (perhaps most concentrated around Rishikesh in the state of Uttarakhand). In practice, there may be considerable overlap between these three groups. For example, foreigners may sometimes join a traditional sampradāya in which some yoga is practised; urban Indians increasingly partake in yoga classes aimed at foreign tourists; and some sampradāyas may adapt their teachings to reflect contemporary global trends (the Nāths, for example, appear to be foregrounding the practice of āsana in response to the global postural yoga boom and their perceived role as the inventors of haṭhayoga (Mallinson 2014: 174 n.38). The division nevertheless points to fairly distinct constituencies of yoga practitioners and teachers in India. The emphasis in many contemporary Hindi yoga milieus remains on the health of the body, particularly in therapeutically-oriented institutions like Kuvalayananda’s Kaivalyadhama, Yogendra’s Yoga Institute, or the Vivekananda Yoga Kendra in Bangalore.1 Bihar Yoga Bharati also places a strong emphasis on the therapeutic applications of yoga (and publishes a series of books dedicated to the treatment of particular diseases), alongside a strong ‘spiritual’ orientation. In many cases, the discourses underlying the practices remain greatly influenced by Vivekananda, Aurobindo and other early modern pioneers of householder yoga in India. Within such yoga schools there may also be a markedly 172 Yoga and physical culture cultural-nationalist agenda, such as in the Vivekananda Kendra, or in the organization of the controversial Swami Baba Ramdev, perhaps today’s most famous and widely followed public yogin (see Sarbacker 2013). Ramdev’s practical yoga exercises are reminiscent of the ‘subtle exercise’ of Indira Gandhi’s renowned yoga teacher Dhirendra Brahmachari (see Brahmachari 1965), and Ramdev’s political orientation remains distinctly Hindutva- inclined.2 In this context, it is also worth noting the prominent place given to yoga practice by the right-wing cultural-nationalist organization the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS; see McDonald 1999 and Alter 2008). However, in recent decades, yoga has become a thoroughly globalized practice, reaching well beyond South Asia to pervade urban societies across several continents. No reliable estimates for world-wide practitioner numbers are available, but a 2012 survey by the popular US magazine Yoga Journal reveals that 20.4 million Americans were practising yoga at that time, an increase of 29 per cent from 2008. More than 80 per cent of them were women. What is more, in spite of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, spending on yoga classes almost doubled during those four years, reaching $10.3 billion (Yoga Journal 2012). Anecdotal reports gathered from yoga teachers and studio owners in Britain suggest a similar pattern there. These reports demonstrate the degree to which yoga has become a component part of social and personal life for millions of people outside of India. Perhaps the most prevalent and visible facet of yoga in the modern, globalized world is the practice of āsana, the physical postures of yoga. Today, āsana is sometimes popularly conceived and promoted as an alternative to ‘conventional’ exercise, a ‘holistic’ regime which contributes to the improvement of health, the reduction of stress and overall well-being.3 Significantly, in the same 2012 survey, the top five reasons stated for beginning yoga were flexibility, general conditioning, stress relief, improving overall health, and physical fitness (Yoga Journal 2012). While these may well not be quite the same motivations as for longer-term practitioners continuing yoga, they nevertheless indicate that in certain important global yoga constituencies (here, beginners in the United States), the health and fitness benefits associated with āsana practice are prioritized over and above other what may be more prominent concerns of yoga practitioners in pre-modern Indian traditions, namely meditational states, liberation (mokṣa, kaivalya, etc.), or the accumulation of special powers (siddhi, vibhūti, see Jacobsen 2012). There are of course seemingly similar mundane health concerns within, for example, pre-modern haṭhayoga (such as preventing constipation and gas, getting rid of excess fat and so on), and we need to be sensitive to similarities in modern and ‘traditional’ practice as well as to the differences. However, it is clear that as modern forms of yoga have developed and grown with such remarkable rapidity in a variety of distinct geographical and cultural spheres, the procedures, supporting narratives, end goals and applications have adapted and mutated accordingly. What results is in many respects new, by virtue of the very divergent contexts in which yoga is practised in the globalized world and the manifold techniques and ideas stemming from non-traditional sources, including the often complex, creative and recursive relationship that these techniques and ideas may have with the perceived ‘tradition’ itself. As Simona Sawhney puts it with regard to ‘the modernity of Sanskrit’, ‘Cultural modernity itself becomes what it is by way of a confrontation with tradition – that is to say, with various contesting narratives about tradition’ (Sawhney 2009: 14). Such is also most certainly the case with āsana, regardless of the relative age or particular genealogy of particular postures or sequences in contemporary practice. It is not necessary to assert a recent derivation for āsanas in order to appreciate that āsana practice has taken on a life of its own in contemporary society, and that its role and function need to be considered in this light, as well as in the broader pre-modern context within South Asia. 173 Mark Singleton Yoga and the global physical culture movement One context for understanding the particular development of āsana within contemporary, global contexts is as an outgrowth of yoga’s creative dialogue with the global physical culture movement during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this time, new technologies of the body, mind and spirit, as well as the new or revisioned cultural or ideological frameworks that went along with them, were developed and disseminated across the globe, through photography, print media and travelling teachers. As these technologies and ideas circulated, they informed and were informed by the particular habitus4 in which they found themselves: adapting and causing adaptation, structuring and being structured through ongoing processes of dialectical exchange. In India and elsewhere, physical culture enthusiasts experimented with the potential of yoga (in particular haṭhayoga). Yoga enthusiasts, inversely, experimented with the new, sophisticated resources of modern physical culture. In practice, however, it can be difficult to draw a bright line between these two ‘camps’, insofar as yoga and physical culture were regarded by many as allied, compatible sciences, with similar goals and interchangeable methods. One result of this synthetic bias was that core features of yoga traditions were reframed within the discourse of physical culture, resulting in historically unique modes of yoga practice. Such syntheses are perhaps characteristic of all revivalist movements, and are certainly a feature of the ‘modern yoga renaissance’ as a whole (De Michelis 2004). This period of creative exchange gave rise to a new perception of yoga as an Indian method of holistic fitness, which in some quarters displaced competing narratives of yoga’s function and goal to become the predominant discourse. This endures today in the predominance of health and fitness-oriented āsana practice in many local and transnational varieties of global yoga culture. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of interest in practices of health and fitness, often expressed in terms of the individual’s duty to the nation and national militaristic prowess. Recapitulating and adapting Thomas Hobbes’ influential vision of state and citizen, the body of the subject was perceived as a microcosmic instantiation of (a particular limb of) the state body. This vision became part and parcel of the patriotism and nationalist pride that accompanied the rise of the modern nation